More thoughts on the Influence of President Obama on the "Russiagate kerfluffle"

 

 I shamelessly clipped this from a guy I follow on farcebook by the name of Michael Smith., he is spot on on his assertion about President Obama influence on this.  I hope some heads roll for this. but truth be told, I don't think the Republicans have the spine for this. whereas if the situation was the reverse, the donks would do it in a new york minute and because they have the entire academia, media, and outrage complex behind them, would make it stick. 

I’ve long believed Obama’s hands were dirty in every aspect of the “Get Trump” affair.

This is just not something a little insurrection-ey the members of a coffee klatch cooked up in an Alexandra Starbucks and then decided it was worth doing. This is something that gets done because you are completely dedicated and devoted to a charismatic leader you believe somehow supersedes all others in wisdom, purity and leadership and want to see his legacy become real and permanent, and you are willing to break every oath, every law, and ignore the Constitution to see it through.

For people to risk their reputations – in truth, risk life and limb - to run a decades long operation to try to stop a candidate from being elected and when he beat the odds, to try to manufacture a process to end his presidency before it started, to impeach him twice, then try literally every trick in the book to destroy his business, his family , his inner circle, and to imprison him for civil, criminal, and national security crimes seems way too Jim Jones/Peoples Temple-ish.

This is about hatred of Trump, but I think it is more about total devotion to Obama – mostly because what people did represented great personal risk – bordering on sedition and possibly extending to treason.

The notion that a DOJ operation targeting a rival party’s candidate could proceed without the sitting president’s knowledge or approval is unthinkable. Obama, known for his calculated oversight, likely relied on Susan Rice as an intermediary to maintain plausible deniability until Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory over “Madam NeverPresident” Hillary Clinton forced his direct involvement.

The question in my mind isn’t whether Obama was complicit - it’s just how deep his involvement ran. With DNI Tulsi Gabbard now accessing classified records and referring them to the authorities and Congress, the extent of Obama’s role may soon come to light.

The Jack Smith J6 indictment of former President Donald Trump fierce debate, drawing parallels to the actions of Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. If the legal threshold applied to Trump were universally enforced, both Gore and Clinton could face severe consequences for their roles in challenging election results. Gore’s prolonged legal battle over Florida’s vote count in 2000, which delayed the certification of George W. Bush’s victory, and Clinton’s persistent 2016 claims that Trump’s presidency was “illegitimate” due to alleged Russian interference, could be interpreted as undermining electoral trust - much like the accusations against Trump.

The left claimed – and still claims – that “election denialism” is some kind of disqualifying belief, even as they indulge in it.

For example, Hillary Clinton’s public statements, including her 2019 assertion that the election was “stolen,” mirror the rhetoric she criticized in Trump. Similarly, figures like James Clapper, James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, John Brennan, and the 50 intelligence officials who falsely labeled Hunter Biden’s laptop as “Russian disinformation” in 2020 could and should face legal scrutiny for peddling misleading narratives to sway voters. Their actions, often justified as protecting national security, suggest a pattern of manipulating public perception to influence elections.

A key example of this interference is the January 5, 2017, White House meeting involving Strzok, Susan Rice, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Sally Yates. Declassified notes reveal they discussed surveilling Michael Flynn, Trump’s incoming national security advisor, and withholding critical information from the Trump team. This meeting, far from a one-off, was part of a broader effort tied to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, launched in July 2016 to probe Trump’s campaign based on flimsy evidence like the Steele dossier - a document later discredited for its unverified claims. By the time the 2020 election loomed, Crossfire Hurricane had evolved into a sprawling operation, raising questions about its true purpose: was it to investigate or to sabotage?

And remember Rice’s memo to herself, written on January 20, 2017, claiming Obama insisted everything be “by the book”? Why even have any written evidence of that meeting, especially a memo that reeks of a cover-your-ass move.

This may well turn into one of those “we know” situations where we lack enough hard proof to overcome the horrific thought of dealing with, and punishing, the aftermath of the greatest conspiracy to attack the Constitution and American sovereignty in the history of this nation. I think the only hope there are more than a few breadcrumbs is that this group of saboteurs were far more arrogant than they were smart or careful. Whether enough clear evidence can be found and substantiated is still open – and assuming there is something concrete, perhaps the biggest question is whether our judicial system has the courage to pursue them against a former two term president and his Mission Insurrection team.

"Don't do Russia's work"

I saw this article on farcebook, one of my friends had posted it and I had read it and I thought that it was very well stated.  People that say that "Russia is supporting Trump or supporting Bernie" are missing the point.  Russia is after Chaos and they get it in spades especially after the 2016 election.  I personally believe that Russia would prefer a democrat in office rather than Trump. but they will play one group against another because they want chaos and the United States in turmoil, and when the US is in turmoil, it benefits them.    Look at the past 3 years, there has been a constant drumbeat against Trump.  I am surprised he was able to do as much as he was able to with the constant internal attacks.  We can squabble amonst ourselves, but the squabbling ends at the oceans.  Well not anymore, we have people from the democrats trying to make deals separately with the various regimes that are hostile to America.  I honestly believe that Trump will win in 2020, when he first ran for president, I had grave reservations, I liked Ted Cruz, but when the Donald got the nod, I supported him, voting for Felonia von pantsuit was a nonstarter.  He has impressed me, in the past the GOP president tried to take the high road and ignore all the slings and arrows , but Trump fights, he will get in the mud and sling back at them and he is a lot better than they are at it.  He fights, and for that reason, I will overlook the incessant Twitter comments, although I can see why he uses social media, the establishment media view themselves as the "Gatekeeper of Knowledge" and only news that they approve of gets disseminated.

    The article came from "Security Studies Group"

Back in 2017, we at the Security Studies Group published a piece called Understanding Russian Propaganda. Now, in the run-up to the 2020 elections, we should certainly be on the lookout for Russian propaganda. There is likely to be some, which must be identified and countered. This piece does not intend to suggest otherwise.
What I do want to do here is to reinforce a point from the 2017 article:  Russia’s main effort is to divide Americans against each other, not to support any particular outcome in any particular election. Irresponsible speculation that someone is being backed by Russia — let alone an actual agent of Russia’s — is doing the work of the Russians for them. Insofar as this kind of rhetoric is deployed without hard evidence, it is irresponsible. When American speakers with prominent platforms engage in this kind of irresponsible rhetoric, they can reach far more people and do far more damage than the Russian government’s propaganda arm could ever purchase with its limited resources.
The argument from 2017 applies verbatim to the current situation:

If we remember that dividing us and sowing distrust among Americans is the main effort, it becomes obvious that the Russians have found a powerful strategy in not hiding some of their propaganda efforts. Lots of people are now thinking about Russia all the time, and wondering which of their opponents are secretly Russian agents.  That’s a much greater effect than they could have had by planting all the actual agents they could afford.

On that occasion, the target was H. R. McMaster. Today the targets are Richard Grenell, Senator Bernie Sanders, and of course President Donald Trump.  As liberal outlet The Nation points out, the playbook is the same against Sanders as it has been against all the figures from the Trump administration:  some vague intelligence is leaked to the press, where it is allowed to stand as a kind of guilt-by-association. Russia ‘might be’ helping X, therefore X is in some sense doing things that are in Russia’s interest; perhaps they are even agents of that hostile foreign power.

The latest round of Russian interference panic followed a familiar script. Vague leaks that US intelligence officials have determined that Russia intends to boost both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders made front-page headlines. Cable news pundits and Democratic luminaries seized the moment with ritual alarmism: “The Russians are coming,” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough pronounced, and Trump—who “is a Russian operative” (MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell) and “Putin’s puppet” (Hillary Clinton) “is trying to cover it up” (CNN’s Don Lemon)…. James Carville concurred: With Sanders winning Nevada, Carville told MSNBC, “the happiest person right now is Vladimir Putin.”
The outcry proceeded despite a stunning lack of evidence or even a single detail on what the supposed Russian interference entails…. [Russia] the New York Times added, has “a new playbook of as-yet-undetectable methods.” This raises the obvious question: If Russian methods are undetectable, how can US officials detect them? Perhaps there is nothing to detect[.]

If we look at who is actually doing Russia’s work — dividing Americans against one another with these suggestions of foreign influence — it turns out that these journalists are much better candidates for ‘Russian agents’ than any of the politicians (excepting Ms. Clinton, who is right there with the journalists advancing irresponsible rhetoric). I do not say this to accuse them, or anyone, of being a Russian agent. What I mean to say is that Putin has more reason to be happy because major TV networks are accusing the winner of the Nevada caucus of being a spy than he has reason to feel good about Bernie Sanders having won.
Bernie Sanders’ election might possibly be good for Russia insofar as he is able to make good on his campaign rhetoric to undercut America’s energy exports. Russia’s economy and much of its geopolitical power derives chiefly from its energy exports, especially to Europe. Sanders’ desire to cut American exports would drive up prices for energy in the global market, enriching Russia, and make Europe much more dependent than currently on Russian gas and oil. Sanders’ stated desire to cut American military spending would probably also delight the Russians. Yet none of those policies is being advanced by Sanders because they would help Russia. He wants to cut energy exports because he believes it will help the climate; he wants to cut military spending as a believer in a longstanding left-liberal/progressive critique of America as warlike and imperialistic. Any benefit to Russia is coincidental.
And by the inverse argument, it is at this point indefensible to suggest that the Trump administration are Russian agents. No American administration since Reagan’s has done more harm to the Russian geopolitical position, in this case exactly by advancing America’s energy exports. Just as Reagan bled the Soviet Union out with a military buildup they could not afford to match, Trump is bleeding them by causing international energy prices to be at much lower levels, and by scarfing up a larger share of the international market for American producers. As Omri Ceren of Ted Cruz’s office points out, Richard Grenell did as much as anyone to slow the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. That pipeline is arguably Russia’s #1 agenda item, because it would tie central Europe to Russian energy exports in much the same way that Eastern Europe is tied to Russia. That would give Russia a powerful lever to force Europe, even wealthy Germany, to give in to its designs. There is no plausible way that these people are Russian agents and also aggressively working against Russia’s most crucial interests.
One thing has changed since the 2017 article. In 2017, the Mueller investigation was only getting started and there was some possibility that it would uncover Russian agents in the Trump administration. In 2020, we know that the Mueller investigation — which was intense, and destroyed several lives of even wealthy and connected persons in order to compel cooperation — found no evidence that any Americans colluded with Russia. That is good news, and we should celebrate it. Even in 2017, it was important to be careful and critical of speculation because of the damage done to American unity by sowing distrust. In 2020, it is outright irresponsible to engage in this kind of talk absent very hard evidence establishing the truth of it.
No doubt the Russians will run some information operations targeting our elections. They’d be fools not to, since they get so much mileage out of it. We don’t have to help them carry their ball downfield. Be wary of becoming a participant in Russia’s information warfare against our own nation.

Russia-Gate flops for the democrats.

I saw this on Consortium news and it touched on the Democrats continually pushing the Russia thing

Exclusive: The national Democrats saw Russia-gate and the drive to impeach President Trump as their golden ticket back to power, but so far the ticket seems to be made of fool’s gold, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry
The national Democratic Party and many liberals have bet heavily on the Russia-gate investigation as a way to oust President Trump from office and to catapult Democrats to victories this year and in 2018, but the gamble appears not to be paying off.

A sign at the Women’s March on Washington points out that the demonstration attracted a larger crowd than Donald Trump’s inauguration. Jan. 21, 2017. (Photo: Chelsea Gilmour)

The Democrats’ disappointing loss in a special election to fill a congressional seat in an affluent Atlanta suburb is just the latest indication that the strategy of demonizing Trump and blaming Russia for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat may not be the golden ticket that some Democrats had hoped.
Though it’s still early to draw conclusive lessons from Karen Handel’s victory over Jon Ossoff – despite his raising $25 million – one lesson may be that a Middle America backlash is forming against the over-the-top quality of the Trump-accusations and the Russia-bashing, with Republicans rallying against the image of Official Washington’s “deep state” collaborating with Democrats and the mainstream news media to reverse a presidential election.
Indeed, the Democrats may be digging a deeper hole for themselves in terms of reaching out to white working-class voters who abandoned the party in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to put Trump over the top in the Electoral College even though Clinton’s landslide win in California gave her almost three million more votes nationwide.
Clinton’s popular-vote plurality and the #Resistance, which manifested itself in massive protests against Trump’s presidency, gave hope to the Democrats that they didn’t need to undertake a serious self-examination into why the party is in decline across the nation’s heartland. Instead, they decided to stoke the hysteria over alleged Russian “meddling” in the election as the short-cut to bring down Trump and his populist movement.
A Party of Snobs?
From conversations that I’ve had with some Trump voters in recent weeks, I was struck by how they viewed the Democratic Party as snobbish, elitist and looking down its nose at “average Americans.” And in conversations with some Clinton voters, I found confirmation for that view in the open disdain that the Clinton backers expressed toward the stupidity of anyone who voted for Trump. In other words, the Trump voters were not wrong to feel “dissed.”

Hillary Clinton at the Code 2017 conference on May 31, 2017.

It seems the Republicans – and Trump in particular – have done a better job in presenting themselves to these Middle Americans as respecting their opinions and representing their fears, even though the policies being pushed by Trump and the GOP still favor the rich and will do little good – and significant harm – to the middle and working classes.
By contrast, many of Hillary Clinton’s domestic proposals might well have benefited average Americans but she alienated many of them by telling a group of her supporters that half of Trump’s backers belonged in a “basket of deplorables.” Although she later reduced the percentage, she had committed a cardinal political sin: she had put the liberal disdain for millions of Americans into words – and easily remembered words at that.
By insisting that Hillary Clinton be the Democratic nominee – after leftist populist Bernie Sanders was pushed aside – the party also ignored the fact that many Americans, including many Democrats, viewed Clinton as the perfectly imperfect candidate for an anti-Establishment year with many Americans still fuming over the Wall Street bailouts and amid the growing sense that the system was rigged for the well-connected and against the average guy or gal.
In the face of those sentiments, the Democrats nominated a candidate who personified how a relatively small number of lucky Americans can play the system and make tons of money while the masses have seen their dreams crushed and their bank accounts drained. And Clinton apparently still hasn’t learned that lesson.
Citing Women’s Rights
Last month, when asked why she accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars for speaking to Goldman Sachs, Clinton rationalized her greed as a women’s rights issue, saying: “you know, men got paid for the speeches they made. I got paid for the speeches I made.”

The Wall Street bull statue by Arturo Di Modica

Her excuse captured much of what has gone wrong with the Democratic Party as it moved from its working-class roots and New Deal traditions to becoming a party that places “identity politics” ahead of a duty to fight for the common men and women of America.
Demonstrating her political cluelessness, Clinton used the serious issue of women not getting fair treatment in the workplace to justify taking her turn at the Wall Street money trough, gobbling up in one half-hour speech what it would take many American families a decade to earn.
While it’s a bit unfair to personalize the Democratic Party’s problems, Hillary and Bill Clinton have come to represent how the party is viewed by many Americans. Instead of the FDR Democrats, we have the Davos Democrats, the Wall Street Democrats, the Hollywood Democrats, the Silicon Valley Democrats, and now increasingly the Military-Industrial Complex Democrats.
To many Americans struggling to make ends meet, the national Democrats seem committed to the interests of the worldwide elites: global trade, financialization of the economy, robotization of the workplace, and endless war against endless enemies.
Now, the national Democrats are clambering onto the bandwagon for a costly and dangerous New Cold War with nuclear-armed Russia. Indeed, it is hard to distinguish their foreign policy from that of neoconservatives, although these Democrats view themselves as liberal interventionists citing humanitarian impulses to justify the endless slaughter.
Earlier this year, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found only 28 percent of Americans saying that the Democrats were “in touch with the concerns of most people” – an astounding result given the Democrats’ long tradition as the party of the American working class and the party’s post-Vietnam War reputation as favoring butter over guns.
Yet rather than rethink the recent policies, the Democrats prefer to fantasize about impeaching President Trump and continuing a blame-game about who – other than Hillary Clinton, her campaign and the Democratic National Committee – is responsible for Trump’s election. Of course, it’s the Russians, Russians, Russians!
A Problem’s Deep Roots
Without doubt, some of the party’s problems have deep roots that correspond to the shrinking of the labor movement since the 1970s and the growing reliance on big-money donors to finance expensive television-ad-driven campaigns. Over the years, the Democrats also got pounded for being “weak” on national security.

President Bill Clinton, First Lady Hillary Clinton and daughter Chelsea parade down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 1997. (White House photo)

Further, faced with Republican “weaponization” of attack ads in the 1980s, many old-time Democrats lost out to the Reagan Revolution, clearing the way for a new breed of Democrats who realized that they could compete for a slice of the big money by cultivating the emerging coastal elites: Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and even elements of the National Security State.
By the 1990s, President Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council defined this New Democrat, politicians who reflected the interests of well-heeled coastal elites, especially on free trade; streamlined financial regulations; commitment to technology; and an activist foreign policy built around spreading “liberal values” across the globe.
Mixed in was a commitment to the rights of various identity groups, a worthy goal although this tolerance paradoxically contributed to a new form of prejudice among some liberals who came to view many white working-class people as fat, stupid and bigoted, society’s “losers.”
So, while President Clinton hobnobbed with the modern economy’s “winners” – with sleepovers in the Lincoln bedroom and parties in the Hamptons – much of Middle America felt neglected if not disdained. The “losers” were left to rot in “flyover America” with towns and cities that had lost their manufacturing base and, with it, their vitality and even their purpose for existing.
Republican Fraud
It wasn’t as if the Republicans were offering anything better. True, they were more comfortable talking to these “forgotten Americans” – advocating “gun rights” and “traditional values” and playing on white resentments over racial integration and civil rights – but, in office, the Republicans aggressively favored the interests of the rich, cutting their taxes and slashing regulations even more than the Democrats.

The run-down PIX Theatre sign reads “Vote Trump” on Main Street in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota. July 15, 2016. (Photo by Tony Webster Flickr)

The Republicans paid lip service to the struggling blue-collar workers but control of GOP policies was left in the hands of corporations and their lobbyists.
Though the election of Barack Obama, the first African-American president, raised hopes that the nation might finally bind its deep racial wounds, it turned out to have a nearly opposite effect. Tea Party Republicans rallied many white working-class Americans to resist Obama and the hip urban future that he represented. They found an unlikely champion in real-estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump, who sensed how to tap into their fears and anger with his demagogic appeals and false populism.
Meanwhile, the national Democrats were falling in love with data predicting that demographics would magically turn Republican red states blue. So the party blithely ignored the warning signs of a cataclysmic break with the Democrats’ old-time base.
Despite all the data on opioid addiction and declining life expectancy among the white working class, Hillary Clinton was politically tone-deaf to the rumbles of discontent echoing across the Rust Belt. She assumed the traditionally Democratic white working-class precincts would stick with her and she tried to appeal to the “security moms” in typically Republican suburbs by touting her neoconservative foreign policy thinking. And she ran a relentlessly negative campaign against Trump while offering voters few positive reasons to vote for her.
Ignoring Reality
When her stunning loss became clear on Election Night – as the crude and unqualified Trump pocketed the electoral votes of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – the Democrats refused to recognize what the elections results were telling them, that they had lost touch with a still important voting bloc, working-class whites.

The crowd at President Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)

Rather than face these facts, the national Democrats – led by President Obama and his intelligence chiefs – decided on a different approach, to seek to reverse the election by blaming the result on the Russians. Obama, his intelligence chiefs and a collaborative mainstream media insisted without presenting any real evidence that the Russians had hacked into Democratic emails and released them to the devastating advantage of Trump, as if the minor controversies from leaked emails of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta explained Trump’s surprising victory.
As part of this strategy, any Trump link to Russia – no matter how inconsequential, whether from his businesses or through his advisers – became the focus of Woodward-and-Bernstein/Watergate-style investigations. The obvious goal was to impeach Trump and ride the wave of Trump-hating enthusiasm to a Democratic political revival.
In other words, there was no reason to look in the mirror and rethink how the Democratic Party might begin rebuilding its relationships with the white working-class, just hold hearings featuring Obama’s intelligence chieftains and leak damaging Russia-gate stuff to the media.
But the result of this strategy has been to deepen the Democratic Party’s reliance on the elites, particularly the self-reverential mavens of the mainstream media and the denizens of the so-called “deep state.” From my conversations with Trump voters, they “get” what’s going on, how the powers-that-be are trying to negate the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump by reversing a presidential election carried out under the U.S. constitutional process.
A Letter from ‘Deplorable’ Land
Some Trump supporters are even making this point publicly. Earlier this month, a “proud deplorable” named Kenton Woodhead from Brunswick, Ohio, wrote to The New York Times informing the “newspaper of record” that he and other “deplorables” were onto the scheme.

New York Times building in New York City. (Photo from Wikipedia)

“I wanted to provide you with an unsophisticated synopsis of The New York Times and the media’s quest for the implosion of Donald Trump’s presidency from out here in the real world, in ‘deplorable’ country. … Every time you and your brethren at other news organizations dream up a new scheme to get Mr. Trump, we out here in deplorable land increase our support for him. …
“Regardless of what you dream up every day, we refuse to be sucked into your narrative. And even more humorously, there isn’t anything you can do about it! And I love it that you are having the exact opposite effect on those of us you are trying to persuade to think otherwise.
“I mean it is seriously an enjoyable part of my day knowing you are failing. And badly! I haven’t had this much fun watching the media stumble, bumble and fumble in years. I wonder what will happen on the day you wake up and realize how disconnected you’ve become.”
So, despite Trump’s narcissism and incompetence – and despite how his policies will surely hurt many of his working-class supporters – the national Democrats are further driving a wedge between themselves and this crucial voting bloc. By whipping up a New Cold War with Russia and hurling McCarthistic slurs at people who won’t join in the Russia-bashing, the Democratic Party’s tactics also are alienating many peace voters who view both the Republicans and Democrats as warmongers of almost equal measures of guilt.
While it’s certainly not my job to give advice to the Democrats – or any other political group – I can’t help but thinking that this Russia-gate “scandal” is not only lacking in logic and evidence, but it doesn’t even make any long-term political sense.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).